Anil Dash
Tech entrepreneur and writer
Pronouns: he/him
Anil Dash is a technologist, writer, and activist recognized as a leading advocate for making innovative technology that is ethical and inclusive. A Webby Awards lifetime achievement honoree, he has been CEO or founder of several groundbreaking startups including Glitch, the beloved creative community for developers which was acquired by Fastly in 2022.
As a writer, Dash was a monthly columnist and contributing editor for Wired, and has written for publications ranging from The Atlantic to Rolling Stone to Businessweek, while his venerable personal blog has been cited over the last 25 years by everyone from sitting U.S. Senators to hundreds of academic papers to TMZ.
Today, Dash also serves as a board member for vital social organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the indispensable nonprofit defending digital human rights and free expression, and is chair of the board of the Lower East Side Girls Club, which serves girls and families in need in New York City. Previously, Dash was a technology advisor to the Obama White House's Office of Digital Strategy (and later the Obama Foundation), and served for a decade on the board of Stack Overflow, the world's largest community for coders. Previously, he founded and led a MacArthur-backed research project conducting pioneering research on social media’s impact on public policy making. While CEO of Glitch, the company became the first tech startup ever to voluntarily recognize its workers' union.
Described by The New Yorker as a "blogging pioneer", and by the New York Times as a "Prince scholar", he has had a varied career as an artist and creator.
On March 12, Andreen Soley, the Executive Director of the Public Interest Tech University Network, will host Sylvester Johnson and Kelle DeBoth Foust for a conversation on the opportunities to build, use, and co-design technology in and with the community.
Sylvester Johnson
Co-founder and CEO of the Corporation for Public Interest Technology
Pronouns: he/him
Sylvester A. Johnson is co-founder and CEO of the Corporation for Public Interest Technology. Working at the intersection of technology and humanities, he is also a faculty member in the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern University. He previously served as Associate Vice Provost for Public Interest Technology and Director of the Center for Humanities at Virginia Tech, where he was a faculty member in the Department of Religion and Culture. Sylvester also served as Executive Director of the Tech for Humanity initiative at Virginia Tech.
Sylvester's work advances human-centered research and development of new approaches to ethical governance of technology, focusing on artificial Intelligence, inequality, human-machine combining (cybernetics), and synthetic biology. Before moving to Virginia Tech, he worked at Northwestern University in African American Studies and Religious Studies, where he led a collaborative AI project. His research examines religion, race, and empire in Atlantic geographies; religion and sexuality; and the impact of AI technologies on human identity.
Kelle DeBoth Foust
Cleveland State University
Pronouns: she/her
Dr. Kelle DeBoth Foust is an Associate Professor in the Occupational Therapy Department at Cleveland State University, where she has served since 2016. Her clinical areas of expertise and research focus on pediatric occupational therapy, sensory processing, autism spectrum disorders, developmental disabilities, interprofessional education, community-engaged research, and technology applications for children with disabilities. Dr. Foust has secured significant external funding, including grants from the Public Interest Technology-University Network, the National Science Foundation, and the American Occupational Therapy Foundation, totaling over $2.5 million, demonstrating her commitment to using technology to improve accessibility and healthcare outcomes for people with disabilities, sensory processing differences and motor impairments.
Sasha Costanza-Chock
Author of Design Justice
Pronouns: she/her/they/them
Sasha Costanza-Chock (she/they/ella/elle) is a researcher and designer who works to support community-led processes that build shared power, dismantle the matrix of domination, and advance ecological survival. They are a nonbinary trans* femme. Sasha is known for their work on networked social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha is presently the Head of Research & Sensemaking at OneProject.org. She is also a Faculty Associate with the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Design Justice Network (designjustice.org). They are the author of two books and numerous journal articles, book chapters, and other research publications. Sasha’s most widely read book is Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, published by the MIT Press.
Resist and build: What does transition to a democratic economy look like?
In their keynote, Sasha will reflect on this political moment for nonprofits—naming the challenges we face, the forms of resistance taking shape, and what a just transition to a democratic economy could mean, including the role technologists can play.
